“Being an architect is a truly unique opportunity to shape a community and to influence the lives of people for the better.” So says Matt Gilbertson, AIA, NCARB. As a career architect (and principal with RIM Architects –Hawai‘i), he takes that community-shaping opportunity seriously…and he’s ever mindful of an architect’s responsibility to help preserve and protect Hawai‘i’s environment through eco-friendly design and building practices.

For interior designer Karl D. Gottling, ASID Industry Partner, designing the interiors of a Kihei beachfront villa for Maui architect George Rixey came with an atypical challenge. “Normally, my clients say \'do what you like,\'” Gottling explains. “But the villa was a very important project for George, and he was very specific about what he wanted to see inside.”

In the language of geology, a tuff cone is a wide, low-rimmed accumulation of debris around a volcanic vent. The debris, or tuff (from tofus, a Latin word meaning soft, light, porous rock), is igneous rock that forms wherever airborne volcanic pumice falls back to earth, piling up like a sooty snowdrift. The cliffs around Portlock, a residential community on the slope of Koko Head, the lodestone of O‘ahu’s craggy southeastern coast, are made of tuff from the same eruption that formed the crater now known as Hanauma Bay. In the pellucid waters of the bay, a protected marine life conservation area, moray eels slink around Pocillopora coral formations.   

“You dream it, we weave it,” is this rug specialist’s motto;
all-natural Hawaiian Rugs are still woven on traditional looms.

People in love with each other are said to walk on air. People in love with their Hawaiian Rugs walk on art…literally.

The Indich Collection provides beautiful Hawaiian Rugs ®  that consist exclusively of 100% all-natural materials: silk, cotton, wool, and hemp. These “floor tapestries” are hand-dyed and hand-woven on traditional looms.

It’s not easy being green, as Kermit the Frog famously sang many years ago. But in the Hawaiian Islands, leading luxury resorts and cutting-edge home builders and suppliers are proving that you can be environmentally friendly without sacrificing style and comfort. In the Islands, as elsewhere around the world, more and more architects and designers are striving to be, -- and be seen as -- green. Interest in pro-conservation products and policies is shared by building professionals as well as governments, businesses, resorts, and homeowners, many of whom clamor for the latest green goods.

“I’ve always had a strong passion for architecture,” says Breck Dangler, who grew up in the Islands and traveled the world before launching his own successful building firm on Maui in the late 1970s. Over the next several years, he installed hundreds of kitchens. When the time came to add design services to his portfolio, he found it a natural progression. “That practical knowledge of all aspects of construction comes into play when design has to integrate into the actual project,” Dangler says.